Sunday, 12 June 2016

Some favourite passages from this book of lyric poems on "scroll paintings and woodblock prints from Japan's Edo period, which spanned 1603-1868": She from the spent cushiongrasps his clothing, notto keep him but to indicate pleasure-given loyalty.

from "Lover Taking Leave of a Courtesan"

Bitter-

sweet longing becomes inflected

with song.

from "Hibiscus and Korean Nightingale"

How cool

the light in this region of no awe. Welcome

middle register: sane, calm.

end of "Sparrows and Camelia"

A boatman reclines on the roofand smokes. In mist, he is invisible,swept along, an absent-minded god.

Saturday, 28 May 2016

Here are some favourite passages from this powerful, enigmatic book in prose poetry:

Please forgive me. I pray and can't make it stop. There were lambswool wigs and paperweight eyes, two factory fires. Instead of blankness, I learned to draw stars with two triangles, one upside and overlapping the other. I covered pages, then like bracelets, my wrists.

*

What should I do with my mind? Think of the way it broke until the breaking is language.

*

Unlike the other automatons who lift a hand mirror or balloon, she exists even when we close our eyes, slapping one small brass cymbal into another, frantically, to prove touching.

*

When I have a headache, I lift my hand over my eyes--if death is a failure of imagination, we are alive.

*

The mutual helplessness of seeing and being seen.

*

As with every revelation, midair, oblivion is realigned and clarified: I want to die then decide.

*

What makes the object alive is desire without relief.

*

Within the bonnet, the two-faced head is rotated by pulling a string from the torso: one face calm, one crying plastic beads on her cheeks--turning: peaceful, sad, peaceful.

Nothing in-between, no transition--I don't remember why she is suffering, why she is glad. It happens so fast: I am hopeless as I pull the string in her torso, then sick with wonder.

*

After a while, we moan and lift our arms in order to feel what she feels: her pose is agony.

Monday, 23 May 2016

In what I hope will become an annual event, we held our second Great Graduating Poets' Showcase at The Bath Brew House last Friday night, and it was standing-room only! Here's a first round of photos from that excellent night.

Our compere was the tutor for the third-year poetry module this year, Neil Rollinson.

Sunday, 22 May 2016

Some more favourite passages from this amazing book:The pimiento stung his mouth alive like sudden sunset.*You eat like my daughter. With a certainshall I say lucidity.*Black outside air tossed itselfhard against the windows.*Oh don't go, thought Geryon who felt himself startingto slide off the surface of the roomlike an olive off a plate. When the plate attained an angle of thirty degreeshe would vanish into his own blankness.*And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.

from "XXX. Distances"

Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street.

Little rackety wind went by.

Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep.

*

He could see the harbor blackly glittering. Cobblestones grew slick. Smell of salt fish

and latrines furred the air.

*

Hardly glancing

at one another the three of them played

as one person, in a state of pure discovery. They tore clear and clicked and locked

and unlocked, they shot

their eyebrows up and down. They leaned together and wove apart, they rose

and cut away and stalked

one another and flew up in a cloud and sank back down on waves.

*

Black night sky weighed starlessly on the windows.

*

The petals of their colognes rose around them in a light terror.

from "XXXI. Tango"

...the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow cage.

from "XXXII. Kiss"

Ancash sat very straight,

a man as beautiful as a live feather.

*

Soon they were out on the street

walking fast along Avenida Bolívar with a hard wind strumming their bodies.

Monday, 16 May 2016

A first selection of favourite passages from this wonderful book:He clothed himself in this strong word each. *Before this time Geryon had not lived nights just days and their red intervals. * Facts are bigger in the dark.

from "II. Each"

...said his mother

rhinestoning past on her way to the door. She had all her breasts on this evening.

*

She was standing before him now

smiling hard and rummaging in his face with her eyes.

from "III. Rhinestones"

They grinned at each other as night climbed ashore.

from "IV. Tuesday"

Then he met Herakles and all the kingdoms of his life shifted down a few notches.

They were two superior eels

at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

*

The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

from "VII. Change"

Her voice drew a circle

around all the years he had spent in this room.

*

A pure bold longing to be gone filled him.

from "IX. Space and Time"

He understood

that people need

acts of attention from one another, does it really matter which acts?

*

His voice washed

Geryon open.

from "X. Sex Questions"

He could feel the house of sleepers

around him like loaves on shelves.

*

...and a fragment of human voice tore itself out and came past, it seemed

already long ago, trailing

a bad dust of its dream which touched his skin.

from "XII. Lava"

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.

About Me

I am an American poet resident in England since 2001. Previously I lived in Normal, Illinois (till age 19) and southern California (from age 19 to 32). *
My first collection, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), won the London New Poetry Award, and in March 2010 the anthology I edited, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, was published by Shearsman Books. My second collection, Divining for Starters, came out with Shearsman in February 2011, while my third, Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry from The Poetry Society. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement and many other journals.
*
I also publish reviews, most recently in The Guardian, Poetry London and The Warwick Review, and short fiction, with appearances in New Welsh Review, Oblong and Flash.
*
I am a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, where I have taught since 2004.